Shawn P. Sullivan: Who's going to help me help you with your math homework?

Thursday

Apr 28, 2011 at 3:15 AM

Shawn P. Sullivan, Editor of the Sanford News

My daughter asked me to check her math homework the other night.

I reached for the calculator and cross-checked her work. She got everything right. I handed the assignment back to her and told her so.

Maddie offered me a smile that betrayed a touch of disbelief.

"Did you really need a calculator to solve these math problems, Dad?" she asked me.

She put the question to me as a matter of fact. She did not emphasize the word "really" in the snarky and trendy rhetorical way that people are using that word these days. My wife, Valerie, often says, "Really?" in this way, whenever she questions the wisdom or ridiculousness of something I may say or do. I think she picked it up from characters in ads and sitcoms on television. It makes me want to get a T-shirt that says, "Yes. Really."

Did I need a calculator to verify the answers to a second-grader's math problems? I'd like to think not. They were simple math problems in which Maddie had to add together the prices of various art supplies. One question, for example, asked something along the lines of how much an 89-cent paintbrush and a 75-cent colored pencil would cost if bought together.

Was the calculator — off limits to my daughter as she did her homework — necessary? After all, am I not able to keep a running tab of the groceries that I pile into my cart while I shop at the supermarket? This is simple math, right?

Yet I reached for that calculator. I guess I wanted to eliminate the risk of telling Maddie she had gotten an answer right if in fact she had not. Or maybe it was just a lazy reflex — a chance at the end of a busy day to let a palm-sized gadget do my thinking for me.

But here's another likelihood: I'm not very good at math, and evidently I do not trust myself with numbers like I do words.

I'd say it's a family trait — how better to get myself off the hook? — but then I have an uncle who taught high school math. At the same time, though, my cousin and I once attracted attention to ourselves as we stood in the middle of a small restaurant here in town and tried to calculate the tip on a bill we shared. We were so caught up in the task — so focused on this mathematical crisis — that we had no idea we were putting on a sorry comedy routine for the other diners.

Math was my weakest subject in high school and college. These days, I know you can learn just about anything if you commit yourself to mastering a subject, whereas when you're young there may be more of a tendency to throw up your hands and figure a certain topic's just not for you. I understood geometry well enough in school but wrestled with algebra and advanced math. During my senior year of high school, I boosted my final grade by writing a report on fractals for extra credit — but as you can see there, it was the written word that got me out of a jam on my report card.

If writing got me out of that fix in high school, it plunged me into another in college. During my freshman year, I took a statistics class. I belonged to a group of four or five classmates who had to complete a project by the end of the semester. I was selected to write about our group's findings in a final report — an assignment that admittedly did not call for me to do too much calculation.

I did help gather our data. On a cold and rainy April morning, I stood in a lot on campus and measured the parking practices of male and female drivers — how close or how far each motorist parked within the yellow lines, for example, what kind of car they drove, and so on. My classmates and I would compare the statistics to determine the similarities and differences in the way men and women park their cars.

Yeah. I thought it was a ridiculous assignment too.

But I wrote the report based on the computations of our group's findings, and I believe we got an adequate or even satisfactory grade. I had played to my strength of writing and had avoided showing weakness in math.

Until my final exam, that is. For the first time in my life — and the nly time, mind you — I signed my name at the top of an exam and . . . pretty much left everything else blank. I sat there for the duration of the testing period, mortified and helpless, and handed in my catastrophe when most of my other classmates were finished. And here's the kicker: I did study. I was no slacker.

After the test I met my father in the student union; he had come to pick me up and take me home for the summer. He saw me and knew I had bombed the exam. He smiled sympathetically, and maybe even chuckled because he knew even with my poor math grade I had beaten the 1.67 grade-point average he had gotten for the whole semester during his freshman year at the same university.

We're all hooked up in different ways. For me the linear nature of English and writing — you put the first word here and then proceed in a straight line to the last one here— is more accessible than the multiple tracks on which complex math functions.

I also like the possibilities that stem from language and writing, as opposed to the single answer that tends to accompany a math problem. But I do keep an open mind; I am envious of math whizzes for whom the quest to find that answer is exciting while pursued and gratifying when found.

I hope my daughter will do well in math in the years ahead, for it's an important subject. But I also hope it clicks for her because who knows how well I'll add up if she repeatedly stumps me with questions about her math homework when she's older.

For that you would need a calculator.

Shawn P. Sullivan is the editor of the Sanford News. He can be reached at ssullivan@fosters.com

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